Becoming a Developer

I'm interested in making a couple of apps. And I missed the Phone Camp event Microsoft had here in Dallas, Tx. Does anyone know of any sites to teach beginners how to make windows apps? Certain software to use?

You actually don't have to register on AppHub to start developing. You can develop using the emulator and then if/when you're ready to test on a phone and release to the Marketplace you can register and pay then. The SDK is free to all and includes Visual Studio 2010 Express (also free).

There's millions of ways to start, and they're all probably equally good. Just don't allow yourself to think (no matter what MS claims about ease of development) that you can make anything of value quickly.

You'll probably be able to get something up and running quickly. But to create something intuitive, compelling, well designed, robust, and performant - that takes tons and tons of experience.

In the end, there's really only one way. Think of something you want to make, something that sounds hard. Get cracking. When you realize your work so far sucks, throw it all away and start over. Do it again, and then again. If you haven't given up after a year, then you'll have a shot of putting something up on the marketplace that's worthwhile. =)

Once you familiarize yourself with .NET, C#, and Silverlight, you can take a look at Charles Petzold's "Programming Windows Phone 7". There is a free PDF download from his site. The book contains details on developing Silverlight and XNA apps. Here's the link:

Build something really stupid knowing that it's going to be stupid. But doing that stupid thing will build skills that you'll rely on when you want to build something cool. In fact, I have an app in the Marketplace that is my "stupid" app. People download it an use it. But it's really dumb. However, I use that app as my lab and try out new techniques on it that I can reuse on my cool apps.

Just keep trying. C# and Windows Phone is crazy fun. And yes, get Visual Studio Express for free.

Build something really stupid knowing that it's going to be stupid. But doing that stupid thing will build skills that you'll rely on when you want to build something cool. In fact, I have an app in the Marketplace that is my "stupid" app. People download it an use it. But it's really dumb. However, I use that app as my lab and try out new techniques on it that I can reuse on my cool apps.

Just keep trying. C# and Windows Phone is crazy fun. And yes, get Visual Studio Express for free.

I'm interested in making a couple of apps. And I missed the Phone Camp event Microsoft had here in Dallas, Tx. Does anyone know of any sites to teach beginners how to make windows apps? Certain software to use?

Jack

Id recommend just trying to write a really simple app first just something that has a bit of text, maybe some pictures, on screen and lets you tap some things. If you havent chosen between using Visual Basic or C# as the language to learn yet I would choose C# as its more popular, and also used more in industry.

Heres lot of videos for using the software expression blend. You dont need to learn expression blend at first as visual studio does everything but if you do you can make your apps looks beautiful really easily, and it make some parts of wp7 development (the XAML) a lot easier to write than using Visual Studio.Learn Microsoft Expression Blend: videos, tutorials, whitepapers